Amnon Wolman disdains the religious reverence required of modern performances of classical music. It’s around midnight in an Evanston coffee shop, and the Northwestern University professor has just finished rehearsing his upcoming production of Don Giovanni (Revisited), an updating of the Mozart classic with a postmodern, pop-culture-laden spin.
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Wolman’s take on Mozart’s dark and intensely psychological masterpiece–his first venture into directing–is likely to startle most opera lovers. Not only is the staging insistently high tech and unorthodox, but the music has been rearranged and all the characters have been condensed into two leads. “The story we are telling,” he explains, “is the opera’s subtext, the one that’s hidden in the twists and turns of the main narrative and in the separation of characters. It’s about the abusive relationship between a man and a woman–a man who’s a womanizer and has trouble falling in love, and a woman who cannot decide whether to be victimized or to leave him. It’s all very contemporary, touching on issues of feminism, sexual harassment, and addiction. The story is still the same, except my treatment is perhaps more liberating and relevant.”
Up to now Wolman’s reputation has rested chiefly on his expertise in finding novel means of musical expression through electronic gizmos. Born and raised in Israel in a musical household, he was not at all enamored with technology during his conservatory days. In fact, he decided to enroll in a Dutch university’s computer-music program in the early 80s just “to find out how stupid the whole practice is.” Instead he became a convert and ever since has been pigeonholed as an electronic-music maven, hired first by Stanford, then Berkeley, and now Northwestern (to oversee its computer-music lab)–schools that pioneer and popularize the use of the latest computer and video technologies. “It’s a nice niche to be in,” Wolman says, “because many of my colleagues are intimidated by computers. But I feel uncomfortable being limited this way when people commission me to write pieces that include some sort of technology. I see the computer as a machine, not an aesthetics.”
Don Giovanni (Revisited) will be performed at 7:30 and 10:30 on Thursday, February 4, and at 3 and 8 on Friday, February 5, at Metro, 3730 N. Clark. Tickets are $12, $10 for seniors and students. Call 549-0203 or 708-491-5441.
